Meteorology

Sweet merciful Mary, it was cold today. I didn't realize this until I was well on my way to class, and had to just suck it up and hunker down inside my coat, but that gave me a charlie horse in my neck because apparently I'm a little bit tense these days, and so by the time I got to the classroom not only was I shivering violently, but my head was cocked at an alarming angle. Which may have weirded some people out.

Anyway, when I got home I looked up the temperature and it was 6°C. And that meant nothing to me, so I converted it and people, that is 41°F. Forty-one. With a "comfort level" (aka, wind chill factor, for those of us not living in lala-land) of 37°F.

But do you know how the web site described the forecast? "Sunny. A bit nippy."

SCOTLAND. It feels like 37° outside. THAT IS COLD. "Nippy" is when you go outside in a t-shirt in the morning in May to get the paper and you rub your arms a little bit on the way back inside. What we have here is not nippy. It is only five degrees above how you would feel if you were water and you were freezing. Just putting things into perspective.

But then, perspective may be lost on the Scots. Isn't there a scene in Braveheart where the English are torturing William Wallace and cut off his nuts and ask him how he feels now, thou Scottish vartlet, and he tells them, "Weel, it doo sting a wee bit, but nae as poor as swiving yer English lassies" or something like that?

Maybe I haven't actually seen Braveheart. But that is TOTALLY something a Scot would say.